Sustainable Woodstock

We aim to raise public awareness among the
residents of Woodstock and beyond on the issues of climate change,
energy conservation, waste reduction, recycling, bio-diversity,
sustainable economics and respect for the planet.
We are working in partnership with Oxfordshire County Council, West
Oxfordshire District Council, local schools and churches, Blenheim
Palace and the Farmers Market and the Woodstock trade association, Wake
Up to Woodstock

Climate Change

Generation Gap?

A
PERSONAL VIEW FROM COLIN CARRITT, FOUNDER AND VICE CHAIR OF SUSTAINABLE
WOODSTOCK

With
Climate Change as with Brexit, there’s a sense of a younger generation
looking to their future versus an older group who still see life through
some nostalgic golden age of Britain striding the world.If it was ever the case it was achieved over the
backs of the sweated labour we exploited in our colonies around the
world - all those pink splodges on the world atlases of our youth.

And as
for climate change, the young really do get it.They foresee the crisis that will lead to mass
global migration;the inundations of swathes of the world’s great
coastal cities;the millions of acres of wildfires and drought;the loss of pollinating insects that fertilize
our food production;the endless exploitation of the world’s natural
resources that can never be replenished.They see it.They really do get it.

And us?The Oldies (yes, I’m one)?Our mortgages paid, our pensions flopping
through the letter box every month as reliably as the ten o’clock news.Do we get it?“It’ll be alright,” we say, “Technology will
find a solution.The UK weather might be a bit less cold, so
what?It’ll save that fortnight in February in Tenerife.”

But technology won’t find a way.Technology won’t stop the permafrost from
melting;won’t stop the release of billions of tonnes of methane
into the atmosphere that has been safely trapped in the ground since the
last ice age;won’t stop global temperatures rising more than
two degrees which will precipitate the very worst predictions of climate
change;won’t stop the biggest refugee crisis the world has ever
witnessed, as millions seek a better life in a safer country.

So
yes, the young people who are downing their books and pens and leaving
their school lessons to protest at the inaction of my generation to do
something positive to address the crisis of climate change is
commendable.Actually, it’s not merely commendable, it’s
HEROIC.It’s heroic and it deserves a response.

It
demands the response of a massive switch from fossil fuels to renewable
energy.It demands a reconfiguration of food production away from
meat and dairy towards cereal, fruit and vegetables.It demands a switch away from the economics of
growth and consumerism towards sustainability, cooperation and job
creation.Above all it demands fairness, a closing of the
equality gap, a recognition that no matter where they come from, the
citizens of the world are our brothers and sisters and we reject them at
our peril.

Colin
Carritt

What will BREXIT mean for Climate Change and Sustainability?

The UK government won praise six months ago for taking a leading role in
the Paris climate change conference which, for the first time, reached a
legally binding agreement on cutting carbon emissions.With the Bexit vote the UK’s future
participation is called into question.But more seriously the Leave campaign’s victory
provides succour to those groups who oppose climate change action.It could conceivably delay the ratification of
the Paris agreement beyond the date of the US election and, God forbid
that Trump should win that particular race, a change of President in the
US could scupper the agreement altogether.Jonathan Grant, director of sustainability at
PwC said, “[the referendum outcome] is a major setback for the type pf
collaboration needed to tackle global environmental issues such as
climate change.The UK government has been a champion of climate
action at home, within the EU, and in Paris.This leadership is now at risk, with many
supporters of Brexit also opposed to climate policies such as carbon
taxes and efficiency standards.”

The Committee on Climate Change’s (CCC) annual progress report said that
emissions from electricity generation were falling fast but pollution
from transport was rising and action on cutting carbon emissions from
homes has gone backwards.National carbon emissions have fallen by over
4.5% per year since 2012 but almost entirely due to increasing use of
renewable sources of energy generation.There has been virtually no reductions in the
rest of the economy and the rate of installing insulation in homes has
reduced by 90% and the government has scrapped plans to make all new
homes zero carbon.The UK has no policies in place to meet more
than half of the carbon emissions cuts required by law by 2030.The danger following Brexit is that without EU
pressure the government will be even less inclined to adopt low carbon
policies.The government’s abandonment of research and development
into Carbon Capture and Storage technology (CCS) will seriously
jeopardise the UK reaching its 2050 carbon targets
(see the positive news from Iceland on CCS
here)

GreenpeaceUK Executive Director John Sauven added, “Many of the laws
that make our drinking and bathing water safe, our air cleaner, our
fishing industry more sustainable and our climate safer now hang by a
thread …… There is a very real fear that Cameron’s successor will come
from the school that supports a bonfire of anti-pollution protections.”Friends of the Earth said the group could “no
longer rely on the EU to protect our nature and habitats,” adding that
clean beaches, air quality and protection of bees from pesticides were
among issues put at risk by potential loss of EU legislation.

Greenpeace analysys also believe that rules governing restrictions on
the amount of fracking could also be lifted.

So
far as food is concerned it is likely that with a weaker pound food
prices will rise.30% of our food is imported from the EU and the
UK’s food production is heavily dependent on migrant labour.Some 38% of food manufacturing (the UK’s biggest
manufacturing industry,; bigger than cars or aerospace) is foreign born
labour and there won’t be much fresh fruit and veg without foreign
pickers.

Politics, Power, and Economics cannot
be excluded from the Climate Change Debate

Telesur is a Latin American multimedia platform oriented to lead
and promote the unification of the peoples of the south. It is a space
and a voice for the construction of a new communications orderhttps://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
.

CO2 turned into stone in Iceland in
climate change breakthrough

- Guardian Report -
9th June 2016

Radical new technique promises a cheaper and more
secure method of burying CO2 emissions underground instead of storing it
as a gas

Site close to the Hellisheidi geothermal
powerplant, where CO2 was injected into volcanic rock. In two years it
was almost completely mineralised. Photograph: Juerg Matter/Science

Carbon dioxide has been pumped underground
and turned rapidly into stone, demonstrating a radical new way to tackle
climate change.

The unique project promises a cheaper and
more secure way of burying CO2 from fossil fuel burning underground,
where it cannot warm the planet. Such carbon
capture and storage (CCS) is thought to be
essential to halting global warming, but existing projects store the CO2
as a gas and concerns about costs and potential leakage have halted some
plans.

The new research pumped CO2 into the
volcanic rock under Iceland and
sped up a natural process where the basalts react with the gas to form
carbonate minerals, which make up limestone. The researchers were amazed
by how fast all the gas turned into a solid – just two years, compared
to the hundreds or thousands of years that had been predicted.

“We need to deal with rising carbon
emissions and this is the ultimate permanent storage – turn them back to
stone,” said Juerg Matter, at the University of Southampton in the UK,
who led the research published
on Thursday in the journal Science.

Matter said the only thing holding back CCS
was the lack of action from politicians, such as putting a price on
carbon emissions: “The engineering and technology of CCS is ready to be
deployed. So why do we not see hundreds of these projects? There is no
incentive to do it.”

The Iceland project has already been
increased in scale to bury 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year and the basalt
rocks used are common around the world, forming the floor of all the
oceans and parts of the land too. “In the future, we could think of
using this for power plants in places where there’s a lot of basalt and
there are many such places,” said Martin Stute, at Columbia University
in the US and part of the research team.

Testing has taken place in the Columbia
River Basalts, extensive deposits in Washington and
Oregon in the US. India, which has many polluting coal power plants, has
huge basalt deposits in the Deccan
Traps.

One potential challenge for the new
technique is that it requires large amounts of water: 25 tonnes for each
tonne of CO2 buried. But Matter said seawater could be used, which would
be in plentiful supply at coastal sites. Another is that subterranean
microbes might break down carbonate to methane, a powerful greenhouse
gas, but this was not seen in the Iceland research.

The research, called the Carbfix
project, took place at Iceland’s Hellisheidi power
plant, the world’s largest geothermal facility. The plant pumps up
volcanically heated water to run electricity-generating turbines but
this also brings up volcanic gases, including carbon dioxide and
nasty-smelling hydrogen sulphide.

The researchers re-injected 230 tonnes of
the gas, which was dissolved in water to prevent it escaping, down into
the basalt to a depth of 400-500m. They used tracer chemicals to show
that over 95% of CO2 was turned into stone within two years, “amazingly
fast” according to Matter. Edda Aradottir, who heads the project for
Reykjavik Energy,
said: “It was a very welcome surprise.”

Members of the CarbFix science team
handling rock core recovered during drilling at the CO2 injection site.
Photograph: Juerg Matter/Science

The Iceland project has now begun scaling
up to bury 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, plus the hydrogen sulphide which
also turns into minerals. The Columbia University group are also
investigating another
rock type, found in Oman, which may be able to turn
CO2 into rock even better than basalt.

In conventional CCS, the CO2 is stored as a
gas in sedimentary rocks such as exhausted oil fields under the North
Sea. Unlike basalt, these rocks lack the minerals needed to convert CO2
into stone. Such sedimentary reservoirs could potentially leak and
therefore have to be monitored, which adds to costs.

They have also raised concerns from the
public and projects
on land in the Netherlands and Germany have been
halted as a result. “In Europe you can forget about onshore CCS,” said
Matter.

Conventional CCS also requires the CO2 to
be separated from the mix of gases emitted by power stations and
industrial plants, which is expensive. But the basalt-based CCS does not
require this. However, Matter said there would still be a role for
conventional CCS in places where power plants are close to good
reservoirs.

Stuart Haszeldine, professor of CCS at the
UK’s University of Edinburgh and not involved in the new research said
it was promising: “This is terrific. It may well provide a low-cost and
very secure remedy for parts of the world where the suitable rocks
exist. [But] this needs to be used as well as all the existing
propositions, because the problem to be solved of thousands of million
tonnes of CO2 emissions per year in the world is immense and no single
remedy is anywhere near big enough or fast enough.”

However, the UK government cancelled
a pioneering £1bn CCS competition in November.
Globally, CCS has not developed as quickly as hoped, although some
companies are using CO2 injection to drive more oil and gas from older
fields. Haszeldine said there have been over 100 injections of CO2 gas
in different countries worldwide since 1972, none of which are known to
have leaked.